On Cynosure

Last week, I talked about the language problem:

Ages ago, I wrote a manifesto for this little project of mine¹ where I lay out the world according to Dorian. I’ll admit, it’s largely self-indulgent, but hey, it’s my website. And as an educator, I think there’s a lot of value in telling the people who’re learning from you where you’re coming from when you teach them, for two reasons.

First, because a lot of learning is just putting words to stuff you already knew, but didn’t really know how to articulate. And when someone else can give you a structure behind the words along with the words then things often fall into place more quickly.

But of course—and this is the second reason—when you’re learning from other people, you also have to figure out how to fit their words into your mental model of the world. For that, you probably want to understand their mental model too. How close, or how distant it is from your own. So, slang is the most low-level example I can think of for this. Maybe you come to Australia and you hear someone call something ‘red hot’. Is that good? Is that bad? If it isn’t immediately obvious from the context, you’re only going to understand if you know what kinds of thing the person finds good or bad.[^4]

It’s the same for a lot of concepts you learn. You sit in the classroom or are listening to the podcast or whatever, and you’re not really understanding, until they say something that you can connect with something you already knew, and ‘a-ha’—you finally see what they mean.

That article becomes about how language is a barrier to learning. If your idea of something is mapped to different words than my idea of the same thing, then we might never realise we think the same way. As I muse elsewhere:

I’d bet money that this has happened to you. You will say ‘here is an idea, or a solution to your problem’, and people will sort of ignore you. Then someone else says the exact same thing but with different words and people will go ‘oh wow, yes, that was what we needed!’ and you will quietly simmer in your seat. The language problem bites again.

Anyway, last week’s article covers it in great detail. But the intent was actually to work on the solution to that problem:

you need to repeat something three times for everyone in the room to have gotten it. But then he moves on to say that we might want to ‘build a fence’ around an idea—to distinguish your idea from other similar ideas. I think that’s not quite the right approach. I think you want to show them how similar your idea to other similar ideas first. If you did that three times, you start to raise your chances of finding where your language and their language coincide.

And specifically, it was to do this with my manifesto. Because a great deal of my manifesto is doing exactly this, but for me. Fitting other people’s words into my own mental model of the world.² And for it to be useful to you, then I need to repeat those ideas in different ways—allowing you to put words to stuff you already knew, but couldn’t articulate.

And because nothing in that manifesto is really uniquely mine, outside of maybe the writing style or the configuration of emphases, it should be easy to show you how my ideas are similar to other similar ideas.

Basically, it should be easy to sell you on the thing. So let’s have a go, with one of the aspects that people have found more objectionable—Cynosure.

In the manifesto, I say that people are easily distracted. We measure how well we live our lives by things like wealth or status or power or productivity and so on. And you’ll find that these usual measures of success are actually just measurements of how similar or dissimilar we are to others:

Power is measured against the deferral of others. Status against recognition. Productivity against demand. Wealth against whatever our social group defines as wealthy.

On these kinds of metrics we’ll only ever be as successful as the people who surround us allow us to be, so maybe we should measure ourself against something different. And while some people go in trying to maximise states of being—happiness say, or ‘things that spark joy’—you might already know I think trying to hold fleeting things like emotions constant is an ill-fated affair.

Now, these aren’t unreasonable things to try to maximise. This is the utilitarian, the hedonist, the capitalist. But you’re probably not reading this if this is you. Probably you also find this unsatisfying, to live as some kind of shadow of other people—some kind of reflection. Or to live for moments that come and go, wondering why so much time is spent feeling like you’re failing in the intervening periods. It’s not for me. I was attracted to a different philosophy.

I say that what should guide us—our cynosure, or focus—should:

include three things. Of course, betterment is most obvious. We should seek to better ourselves, and our position in the world. Less obvious is the gratification that should follow. Positive states and pleasure are a function of our self-renewal, and no effort at betterment can be complete without them. But perhaps most importantly, we should seek connection. Meaning is derived not from the doing of things, but from the doing of things for something greater than ourselves. Loved ones, gods, people, or the planet, filtering our betterment and gratification through our connection to something more makes the whole thing come together.

Or, as I say on my manifesto-guided tour of this site:

the way I style btrmt. is a little bit of a joke. We love betterment. The hustle. The grind. The girl-boss. Manifestation. Carpe fucking diem. Every major philosophic and spiritual tradition tells us that achievement and excellence should be at the core of what we do, and we have wholeheartedly agreed. But what we often miss is that betterment is empty without gratification and connection. No true betterment can occur without celebrating the fruits of our success and betterment is only meaningful in its reflection in the lives of others. Hence btrmt. Without the vowels. A little reminder that it’s empty when it’s all by itself.

That’s cynosure. And many philosophies, therapies, or spiritual traditions have very similar ideas.

The closest would be Acceptance and Commitment Therapy’s ‘Vitality Compass’, or otherwise called the ‘Values List’. It’s not really a fixed tool, but whatever variant of it you take will have you rate how activities fall into some number of ‘life domains’ like: family, work, spirituality, health, recreation, community, and so on. The quicker and dirtier versions (usually these are called the ‘Vitality Compass’) will lump these together into three:

• Self-improvement/growth;
• Enjoyment/pleasure; and
• Relationships/connection to something greater

And some will split that last item into two, for a total of four.

The idea is that you work out how important each aspect is to you—maybe you rate it one to ten—and how much time you’re spending doing activities in each domain. If you have something rated highly and you’re not doing much of it, then something’s wrong. Similarly, if you’re doing a lot of something you don’t care very much about, maybe you should look at it.

It’s not that surprising that ACT and I both landed on the same core groupings. I mean, it’s not impossible that I came across it in my counselling days and it stuck in my mind. But you’ll find that many approaches to a well-lived life map to very similar ideas.

Humanistic and existential approaches to psychology similarly centre on growth, authentic relationships, and the importance of personal meaning. Viktor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning, thought that finding a sense of personal purpose wasn’t just a core motivation for us, but a critical aspect of retaining our humanity in the face of suffering, whether this purpose took the form of some future goal, loved ones, or simply a sense of personal integrity. Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs similarly sees self-actualization as a goal of our personal development, possibly only in the light of a sense of connection to others and the satisfaction of our other aesthetic and cognitive needs. Later in his career, in fact, he decided that connecting to something greater still transcended even our need to self-actualise. And Carl Rogers made the link between these orientations that humanists saw as essential, and this troubling tendency to measure ourselves against others. He spoke of the importance of authentic relationships, genuineness, and ‘unconditional positive regard’—helping people become more congruent with their ‘real’ and internal self rather than external expectations.

You could zoom out further still, and you might come across Aristotalian virtue ethics—arete, or virtue, is excellence within moral boundaries. The role of the continued development of the self is a core part of our gratification. He called it eudaemonia, or flourishing, and contrasted it to the hedonia which was the more empty pursuit of pleasure in the absence of a virtuous life. The Stoics were harsher, and closer to my motivation for cynosure to boot. Epictetus famously held that external measures of success (money, status, praise) are often distractions from living with virtue and wisdom.

And it’s not just these heavily western traditions. Many eastern traditions find the idea of dharma, or principled living important. A superficial reading of Hindu tradition will bring ideas like artha and kama to your attention—something like material gratification and meaningful pleasure, and the way that enables us—or moksha, the liberation that comes from letting go of the self to become one with something greater.

I don’t skim through all these concepts to treat them lightly. Indeed, I’m deliberately not treating with them at all. I’m just mapping my cynosure to the same kinds of things people have been thinking about forever. Betterment, gratification, and connection. Growth, relationships, and meaning. Excellence within moral boundaries and the value of flourishing. Principled living as a function of meaningful pleasure and connection.

I think many will get great value out of pursuing some of these other philosophies, and there’s plenty to pursue. But I started with ACT’s Vitality Compass because it shows that you don’t need to get deep before you can get going.

So that’s cynosure. It’s me getting going. Betterment, gratification, and connection. Together, the focus of this little website of mine. But I wasn’t the first one to make it a focus, and I won’t be the last.